To Hide the Sword
by Orestes Fasting
Summary: A different take on female Enjolras: During a minor street revolt in 1831, Combeferre discovers that Enjolras is keeping a secret which changes everything and nothing.  What ensues might teach them both a few things about what it means to be a man.
1. Chapter 1

**Note:** Originally posted to the Les Mis anonymous kink meme on LiveJournal, which is why the premise is cracky. The prompt was Enjolras/Combeferre genderswap and I took that and ran with it.

"For [Enjolras], as for Harmodius, flowers were good only to hide the sword."

Combeferre's final verdict was that Enjolras, despite the impressively bleeding scalp wound, mild concussion, superficial gash across the chest, and assorted bruises, was in no real danger. Courfeyrac reacted with deep relief to this discovery, Joly with professional interest; both of them soon rejoined the scuffle outside and left Combeferre to his patient.

Combeferre had not seen fit to mention his first discovery, which was that Enjolras had breasts.

Five minutes before, from his post tending the wounded in the entryway of a building, he had seen Enjolras fall: pierced by a bayonet, then knocked to the ground and half-trampled before Courfeyrac and Joly managed to drag him away. They laid him out unconscious on the hard cobblestones of the entryway, bleeding ominously from a wound in his chest. Combeferre had lost no time about stripping Enjolras' waistcoat off and pulling his shirt up, but the sight of a smooth soft stomach, the hips tapering up to an impossibly narrow waist, stopped him even before he caught a glimpse of the bandages wound around Enjolras' chest. At that moment, with a heavy twist in his gut, he _knew_ without having to see any more. He yanked Enjolras' shirt back down and looked around to make sure Courfeyrac and Joly were still conversing quietly off to the side.

"Clear out the porter's lodge, we need to get him in there where it's warm," he said, the lie coming mechanically and almost independently of his racing thoughts. As Courfeyrac and Joly chased the concierge out and cleared a space on her kitchen table, Combeferre looked back at Enjolras. His features, though slack with unconsciousness, were so familiarly _Enjolras_ that Combeferre started to doubt what he had just seen.

Once they were alone and he had Enjolras shirtless, though, it was undeniable. There was simply no way that torso could be male, even with the yards of bandages flattening the chest. But the dark red stain blossoming over the linen, and Enjolras' shallow steady breathing, reminded Combeferre that he had a job to do. He could deal with the myriad implications of this later.

He cut the bandages away to reveal a four-inch gash on the left breast, just above the nipple. So the point of the bayonet had slid across Enjolras' chest rather than puncturing it. It needed stitches, but not so urgently that he couldn't examine Enjolras' other injuries first: no fractures or depressions in the skull; golden hair dark and matted with blood, which turned out to be from a relatively small but freely-bleeding cut on the scalp; impressive bruising already starting to appear on the shoulder; no limbs visibly broken.

Enjolras was starting to breathe easier with the restrictive bandages gone. He—she—stirred and groaned several times but did not wake while Combeferre was cleaning the wounds and preparing his needle and thread. Combeferre took the opportunity to study—him? her? It was like watching an optical illusion, a bird on one side of the paper and a cage on the other, or perhaps a drawing with two different faces hidden in it. He would look at Enjolras and see the beautiful boy he'd always known, the fierce manly spirit in the frail body of a Greek eromenos. Then his eyes would reach that incongruous bosom, his vision would shift, and he would see a tall, handsome girl. Enjolras as a man was almost too pretty to be real; Enjolras as a woman wasn't quite feminine enough to be pretty, her features just a bit too strong and chiselled, her brow far too severe. Combeferre kept looking back and forth from the male to the female version of Enjolras, hoping the two would blend themselves together into one, or that he would discover the trick that allowed them both to inhabit the same form, but they stayed obstinately separate in his mind.

He began to sew up the wound, and the repeated stinging pain made Enjolras stir and finally wake up. Enjolras' blue eyes fluttered open, hazy and unfocused at first. With the first stirring of life in his face, the girl disappeared, and Combeferre couldn't find any trace of her even though he was holding Enjolras' left breast. Enjolras tried instinctively to recoil from his hand, then finally managed to focus his eyes on Combeferre's face and stilled himself.

"Combeferre?"

"Yes."

"God, my head hurts. Where am I?"

"The porter's lodge of a building in the Rue Mauconseil. Look into my eyes for a moment." Combeferre gazed intently into Enjolras' eyes, then, satisfied that the pupils were dilated but the same size, went back to stitching the gash. "You were knocked out. I need to ask you a few questions to see how bad the concussion is. What's your-" He had been about to ask Enjolras' name, and abruptly realized how absurd that was. "What's today's date?"

"The sixteenth of June, 1831." Enjolras' voice was steady despite the needle traveling in and out of his flesh.

"What's the last thing you remember doing before you were knocked out?"

"Holding off the National Guards who were attacking me, Courfeyrac, and Prouvaire. I don't remember how I went down. What happened to them?"

"Courfeyrac is outside the door waiting to see how you are," said Combeferre. "Prouvaire is still fighting."

"How long was I out?"

"Several minutes. You don't appear to be badly concussed, but the bandages on your chest were restricting your breathing."

Enjolras looked at him; Combeferre didn't ask for an explanation of what was underneath the bandages, and Enjolras didn't provide one.

"They also provided an extra layer of protection against the bayonet," Combeferre continued, "and slowed the bleeding somewhat. As soon as I'm done with the stitches, I'll put fresh ones on—more loosely—and you can put your shirt back on."

"Will I be able to rejoin the fight?"

"Medically speaking?"

"How else?" There was a flash of annoyance in Enjolras' eyes, but it subsided when Combeferre answered without comment.

"In a position of command only. Fencing or hand-to-hand combat might reopen the wound."

"Pistols?"

"They're not shooting out there, it's not a repeat of July yet. But yes, you can use them if necessary."

"Good. Combeferre, does anyone else know about this?"

"No," he answered quietly. "I moved you into a separate room once I realized, and nobody else saw."

Enjolras let out a deep sigh of relief. The accompanying fall of his chest provoked an oath from Combeferre, who did not appreciate a moving target when stitching up a chest wound. He belatedly and stupidly wondered whether to apologize for using foul language in front of a girl, but Enjolras seemed even more relieved that Combeferre was still comfortable cursing around him. Her. It was so difficult to think of Enjolras as a girl. Enjolras didn't seem to want to be thought of as a girl, anyway, and of course Combeferre had always thought of him as a man—had occasionally had some very inappropriate thoughts of him as a man—

And _that_ was not a thought to bring to a half-naked medical examination. Even if, on the basis of a certain sympathy, a few significant looks, a few coded references that he thought had been returned, Combeferre suspected the interest might be mutual. Enjolras was being brusque, taciturn, all business as Combeferre stitched him up, and Combeferre tried his best to emulate that matter-of-factness rather than distract himself by re-evaluating their careful dance of interest in the light of what he had just discovered.

"Combeferre?" came Courfeyrac's voice through the door. "Is he all right?"

"Yes," called Combeferre, tying off his thread. "Give me one more minute." He directed Enjolras to take a few deep breaths and move his hands and feet a little, just in case there were any cracked ribs or sprains he couldn't see, and then to sit up slowly. He pressed some lint against the stitched-up gash and began to wind a bandage around Enjolras' chest, awkwardly trying to flatten down the bosom as he did so.

"Let me do it," said Enjolras. He touched Combeferre's hand lightly and took the bandages, binding his breasts down with practiced ease.

Once his shirt was back on, the illusion of a girl in trousers disappeared completely—or that was what it seemed like to Combeferre, rather than the illusion of a boy becoming complete. Enjolras smiled at him, a warrior archangel in his bloodied shirt and torn waistcoat.

"Why do I find it easier to think of you as a man, even when the evidence to the contrary is right before my eyes?" Combeferre couldn't stop himself from asking.

"Because I think of myself as a man," said Enjolras simply.

"But you-"

"We can discuss it later if you like. Right now there's work to do, and I believe Courfeyrac is anxious to confirm that I'm not dead."

Enjolras' conviction was so convincing that already Combeferre found himself doubting what he had just seen.

Enjolras pressed his hand to Combeferre's shoulder, a brief reassuring gesture before he opened the door. Courfeyrac bounded into the room, followed closely by Joly, and in the ensuing barrage of questions about Enjolras' condition Combeferre forced himself to think only of the medical details of the past five minutes. Enjolras, meanwhile, had ducked outside under the cover of Joly's questioning. Combeferre caught a glimpse of him leading a counter-charge against the National Guard, hair flying and eyes alight with battle-fever. Was Enjolras some sort of shieldmaiden, an Amazon, a latter-day Joan of Arc called to take up arms for the Republic? Combeferre tried to imagine it, but the image eluded him as obstinately as the hidden side of a clever optical illusion, and all he could see was the man he had always known.

He was still trying to see it when someone called "Medic!" and a wounded man was carried into the entryway. Combeferre banished such thoughts from his mind, promising himself he could ponder what he had just witnessed when there was no more battle at hand.


	2. Chapter 2

Enjolras was a woman.

On the surface, it changed nothing. In everything that mattered, it changed nothing. What did it matter if Enjolras was the priest of the Republic or its vestal virgin? They had all been charmed by Enjolras' frail, girlish exterior before discovering the iron conviction that lay beneath it; they had all been awed by this pale, beardless, beautiful youth who carried the spirit of ninety-three in his sad, otherworldly eyes, who spurned everything that was not the Republic and merely smiled his distant virgin smile on his friends' loves and lives and pleasures. It should not have mattered to Combeferre that the youth was in fact a girl. Shocking as it had seemed at first, it made sense. The thing almost explained itself. It was almost a logical extension of Enjolras' paradoxical nature, and it changed nothing of what was important to Enjolras and to the rest of them. The iron conviction was not softened; indeed, it only seemed starker in the light of what Enjolras must have overcome to achieve it.

And yet Combeferre was troubled. A thousand questions flew pell-mell through his head whenever he had a moment to himself, ideas, speculations, demands to re-evaluate everything he thought he knew. Disordered wondering would get him nowhere, he knew. What he needed was a stretch of time alone to compose his thoughts and then talk to Enjolras in private. Would she want to talk about it? Enjolras was usually too caught up in the higher cause to talk of herself and was loath to indulge in this sort of personal reflection, but then again, perhaps this was the reason why. Perhaps she refused to engage in a personal life that might endanger her secret, and now that someone else was in on the secret, she would want to share everything she ordinarily had to surround with a mantle of utter silence. Such a secret could not be easy to keep. Once she had a chance to share the burden of a lifetime of hidden tribulations without endangering herself, surely she would want to break the silence—and maybe it would help Combeferre understand.

And then there were the questions that Combeferre hardly even dared raise to himself, built as they were around secret smiles and the shadows that loom in the space of things left unsaid. He was not sure he had the right to ask them, but that didn't keep them from troubling him.

Combeferre had long since accepted his own nature. What came naturally to other men did not come at all to him. He had tried to love women as he should, and had succeeded only in loving them as sisters and friends; the only true desire he had ever felt had been in the arms of other men. He had denied it, struggled against it, and finally analyzed it as he would any other social problem. To accept that it was harmless had been easy; to accept that it was not wrong had taken much longer. Many times, he had rejected his conclusions for fear that his own inclinations were falsely leading him to absolve himself. But in the end he was forced to admit that his penchant for his fellow man was immutable; that to indulge in it harmed no one; that it could not be unnatural or the product of debauchery, springing up as it did so naturally and purely within him; that the sterile coupling of two men was perhaps not as sacred as the union of the sexes, but that to engage in it was no more worthy of reproach than bedding a woman without the aim of procreation. Independently and without knowing it, he had recreated the defense of the antiphysicals in _Thérèse Philosophe_, with this advantage over Mademoiselle Bois-Laurier: his philosophical rigor forced him to accept his reasoning and take it seriously instead of dismissing his conclusions out of prejudice and disgust. In any case he refused to become one of those men who, weighted down with their self-loathing and unable to rid themselves of the vice that so attracted them, became nothing but their vice: the quintessential soft, weakened pederast. Combeferre was determined to use what nature had given him. He had decided long ago that if it was likely he would never procreate, he could at least make his contribution to future generations by using his intellectual capacities to the fullest extent possible; and if he had covert liaisons with men from time to time, well, it was at worst a harmless fault to count against the achievements of his life.

But Enjolras had thrown him into all kinds of doubt since the moment they met. Combeferre had never been in love. Infatuation, lust, schoolboy friendships that went beyond normal friendship, all these things he had known in varying degrees; and he had felt within himself the capability to fall in love, a yearning for the divine union of souls falling into alignment. Enjolras tantalized and frustrated him at every turn. Combeferre could never shake the feeling that if he ever fell in love, it would be with Enjolras; that they were two parts of the same whole, united in purpose and compensating for one another's faults. Enjolras gave force and drive to Combeferre's ideas, and at the same time he seemed to allow Combeferre to add depth and nuance to his conviction, to soften his rigidity. And yet Enjolras made Combeferre doubt his conclusions on whether his inverted nature was acceptable. No sooner had Combeferre begun to suspect that Enjolras shared his nature, than his mind recoiled before that Spartan austerity. How could Combeferre dare suspect that Enjolras' aversion to women, his grim chastity, a certain feminine charm, meant that Enjolras would ever seek that sort of union with him? The mere thought of the terrible look Enjolras would give him if he broached the possibility made his face redden in shame, and all his reasoning began to look like excuses for his base desires. Surely if Enjolras were like him, he had chosen chastity rather than lower himself to unnatural coupling with another man.

And then just when Combeferre was sure that all his wonderings were no more than vain, shameful fantasy, Enjolras would make him doubt again. His hand would brush Combeferre's as they were working side by side, and just when Combeferre ws ready to die of shame from the electric spark that shot through his skin at the contact, Enjolras would keep his hand there just a moment too long and withdraw it hastily, with the faintest uncharacteristic flush of pink on his cheeks. A meaningful gaze, a word that could easily be misinterpreted, a certain intimacy that he afforded no one else—and Combeferre would be cast back into the agony of doubt.

And now it turned out that Enjolras was a woman.

Combeferre knew that in this secret, speculative part of himself he should have been overjoyed. It explained Enjolras' behavior, at least, if Enjolras was attracted to him and holding back for fear of betraying her secret. Pride, too, perhaps, an unwillingness to go from being a friend and a leader to being no more than a mistress. That, at least, was no obstacle, for Combeferre had not for a moment imagined he could lose respect for Enjolras if they ever became lovers. It would be easy to think he should be relieved to discover that Enjolras was a woman and that his desire was not for the twilight passions of two men, but for the healthy love of male and female. But Combeferre was too honest with himself to be relieved. He had thought himself capable of falling in love with Enjolras when he had thought Enjolras was a man. Enjolras as a woman still had his respect, friendship, veneration, even a bit of newfound tenderness, but Combeferre didn't know if he was capable of falling in love with her.

There, that was the problem. That was the source of his disquiet over a discovery that ought to have changed nothing. It changed nothing that was important; Enjolras was first and foremost the priest or priestess of the Republic; but it was the unimportant, the personal, that had been troubling Combeferre for years, and that was now giving rise to a thousand unanswered questions about Enjolras' past.

He felt that if he could learn who she had been before her transformation into a young man, and what her motives were for the transformation, he might be able to unravel the snarled mess of uncertainties in his head. Had she donned male clothing as a mere convenience to further her ideals, or was she a fellow creature of the third sex, a Sapphist whose masculine inclinations had not stopped at love? What of her chastity? Did it come of natural purity? Was it, too, the product of convenience and dedication to a higher cause? Was it a grim mantle thrown over past faults? A final bastion of feminine dignity for a woman who had forsaken the modesty of skirts and thrown herself into the public square, not to be bought and used and trampled by the masses, but to lift them up from the mud?

Combeferre was alone with Enjolras several times in the aftermath of the riots, but never in sufficient privacy to bring up the subject. In the absence of information, his mind turned over and over upon itself, spinning his uncertainties and suppositions into elaborate theories.

In the most noble and plausible of these theories, Enjolras was some sort of visionary called upon by a higher power to save France from her oppressors, a Jeanne d'Arc of the Republic. Or perhaps she was the intellectual daughter of the previous generation's Théroigne de Méricourts and Mary Wollstonecrafts; equally disgusted by the tyranny placed upon her sex and the tyranny placed upon her country, she had liberated herself from the one in order to liberate France from the other. And yet Enjolras showed little concern for the plight of women, usually leaving such topics to Combeferre. Surely a person of such dedication and principles would not stay silent on her most passionate subject just to keep from arousing suspicion as to her sex.

His more fanciful suppositions were fueled by an additional curiosity: the practical question of how a young woman could pass herself off as a man—as a law student even—in modern-day Paris. Had she first assumed male dress to pursue some Sapphic passion, and found it more to her liking than the constraints of wearing petticoats everywhere? Had she perhaps, like so many other girls, been led to Paris on false pretenses by a lover who promised her the world and delivered only bitter disappointment, and had she then decided to take matters into her own hands? Perhaps she had assumed his identity and his place in the university, and the very name of Enjolras was a falsehood and a blasphemy, the name of the man who had deceived her. Combeferre blushed over these theories; they jarred discordantly with the Enjolras he knew, but if she was already concealing her sex, he had no way to know to what extent the Enjolras he knew was a mere persona.

And yet these were not the most lurid and fantastical of the theories that his brain produced. Strange ideas issued forth from the tangled web of question and conjecture: Enjolras was some sort of mythical androgyne; Enjolras was a madwoman with delusions of being a man; what if Enjolras had been raised as as a boy from the very beginning, ignorant of her true sex until adolescence? Impossible thoughts, disrespectful thoughts, the stuff of boulevard melodramas piecing itself together in his head: a difficult childbirth where the woman loses the ability to conceive again and almost loses the baby, a family desperate for a male heir, a girl-child passed off as a boy, a snarled knot of coincidences and deceptions where all the threads are neatly tied off at the end and everyone falls into their proper place. What was Enjolras' proper place?

Thus did Combeferre torment himself while waiting for a chance to talk to Enjolras alone. His wait was long, as Enjolras was impossibly busy in the night and day that followed the riot, and when they finally saw each other in private, it was under circumstances far different from those Combeferre had imagined.


	3. Chapter 3

Two days after Combeferre discovered Enjolras' secret, Enjolras called on Combeferre in his tiny apartment adjoining the Necker Hospital. It was eight in the morning; Combeferre had just sat down with a newspaper and a pot of the concierge's execrable coffee, intending to read the reports of the riot's suppression and see if anyone he knew had been arrested, when Enjolras turned up on his doorstep.

With Enjolras actually present, all of Combeferre's harebrained theories vanished into thin air and he began to feel downright ashamed for thinking them up in the first place. Enjolras' presence was so very familiar and unchanged that it seemed unnecessary to call everything into question, and outrageous to apply such wild speculations to this serious young man with the face of a girl. A dozen self-recriminations crossed Combeferre's mind in the time it took him to invite Enjolras into his flat.

He opened his mouth to question Enjolras and finally get the facts laid on the table where he could examine them rationally, but Enjolras cut him off.

"We have a problem." He—she—_he_, it was a great deal of work to think of Enjolras as a she—looked distracted, haggard, and not at all as though he wanted to discuss why he wasn't wearing skirts. "A Friend of the ABC was rounded up after the uprising the other day. One of the workers who sometimes meet us at Corinthe. An acquaintance of Bahorel's; Courfeyrac knows him too. If the authorities are up to their usual tricks, they will use a procedural loophole to detain him indefinitely: an annoyance for a student or a man of independent means, loss of wages and eventual loss of job for a worker. They wish to intimidate the people away from public protest, through starvation if necessary. Odious enough in the abstract, but now it is being used against a member of our Society, and I will be damned if I let it be said that the students abandon the workers, that we encourage risks among those who have more to lose than we do and then refuse to jeopardize our privileges in order to help them. And I will be damned if I abandon a Friend of the ABC."

Combeferre stared at Enjolras in shock—she wanted to talk business as if nothing had happened?—then immediately checked himself. Why should he expect Enjolras to put personal matters before business in the aftermath of an insurrection? Bad enough to think he could wring heartfelt personal confessions out of him—her—in the first place; worse to expect such a thing when they had a wave of mass arrests on their hands. "What are we to do?" he found himself asking.

"We must post bail for him before we worry about any legal defense. He was arrested last night, Friday. He will perhaps not be missed on the Saturday after a riot, but if he isn't in his workshop on Monday. . ."

"Bail? How much?"

"Five hundred francs."

"Can we raise all that on such short notice?"

"I came here to ask you for the last thirty-seven francs." Seeing Combeferre's stupefied expression, Enjolras smiled and began rattling off sums. Another man might have consulted a slip of paper, but Enjolras carried it all in his head. Her head. God, this was difficult. "The Friends of the ABC have one hundred seventy-one francs in reserve, collected from the members at various points, for any expenses deemed necessary. Given that the case is urgent and the money will be refunded if this fellow shows up to the judicial proceedings, it's reasonable to use this money for his bail. Courfeyrac has already scraped together one hundred fifty francs by representing to three different relatives that his dearest friend was wounded in a duel and needs fifty francs to pay the doctor. From various other friends of the ABC, one hundred seventeen. I sold my Roman law textbooks: twenty-five francs. Total: four hundred sixty-three. We need thirty-seven francs and this man's job will be saved."

"And Courfeyrac and Bahorel think he can be trusted not to run?"

"Would I be here if they didn't?"

"Very well," said Combeferre. "My allowance just came in. I'm sure several of the booksellers I frequent will be devastated not to see me for a while, but that's a small price to pay for a man's livelihood." He unlocked a drawer in his desk and fumbled around until he had found two gold Napoléons, then pressed them into Enjolras' hand.

"Thank you." Enjolras gave him one of those fleeting, overwhelming smiles and turned to leave.

"Wait—" Combeferre cried as his brain caught up to what was happening. "Don't leave yet. This isn't the conversation I expected to be having with you. How is your wound? How am I to address you now, after what I discovered? What should I even call you? How are we to treat each other now that the secret is out between us?"

"My wound does not trouble me," said Enjolras impatiently. "As for the rest, I should very much like it if we could go on exactly as before."

"But that's impossible. I don't even know—Enjolras, who _are_ you?"

"The same man you've always known."

"But you can't be—"

"I am. I hope that knowing the truth about my physical form will not make you believe that the rest of me is a mere act, and I certainly hope you will not soften yourself around me, or think me less than I was, or try to come the gallant." There was a wry twist to these last words, and Combeferre realized that Enjolras too was aware of their covert flirtation over the years. "Believe me, Combeferre, a continuation of things as they were is the best either of us can hope for."

"But—"

Enjolras looked at his watch, his patience clearly running out. (Combeferre temporarily gave up on thinking of Enjolras as 'she.' It was too difficult when Enjolras was there in front of him in trousers, with his familiar manner and the morning sunlight catching in his cropped golden hair.) "Combeferre, a man's livelihood is at stake. We have no time for this. If you wish to continue this conversation, come with me and we can talk along the way."

This was the last thing Combeferre had expected for their first meeting after the discovery. He had prepared himself for revelations, confessions, disappointments, even arguments, but not the possibility that Enjolras simply did not want to talk about it. In hindsight he felt foolish for it, because what could be more characteristic of Enjolras than to ignore personal questions when there was something to be done for a higher cause? He had expected change and found none, and it was strangely comforting, because it made it easier to believe they could indeed go on exactly as before. Combeferre was not entirely sure that going on as before was the right thing to do, but it was certainly tempting. It was easy to believe Enjolras when he said nothing had changed except a few unfortunate physical realities—especially when Enjolras didn't leave him the time to contemplate those physical realities before hurrying him out the door. Combeferre barely had time to grab his hat, roll up his newspaper, and stick it into his coat pocket for later perusal before they were on their way.

The Boulevard des Invalides was quiet and empty that morning. Its broad expanse stretched further than the eye could see, a cloud of dust hanging evenly over it, undisturbed—this was not one of the places touched by the riots. The two young men who set out from the Necker Hospital had no worries about being eavesdropped upon, for other passers-by were scarce and easily avoided, and hardly of a mind to stop and listen to them.

"Will you at least satisfy my curiosity on the practical details?" Combeferre was saying as they crossed the boulevard.

"Like what?"

"Well—" Combeferre studied Enjolras' form for a moment as they walked. Long strides, as though he'd been wearing trousers all his life—no resemblance to one of those mincing mezzo-sopranos stuffed into breeches for an audience's enjoyment. The barest hints of a fashionably feminine silhouette, although Combeferre knew the body hidden under that waistcoat to be much curvier than the cut of the suit implied. "Well, how did you get the clothes?"

"I went to a tailor," said Enjolras blandly. "Do you want his name?"

"He must be very discreet."

"He is either unobservant, or so discreet as to pretend he is unobservant."

"He must be discreet, then," said Combeferre. "An unobservant man would have cinched in your waist to make you look like a dandy and emphasized the bust to make you look like some Prussian officer. The clothes you are wearing, on the other hand, show remarkable good taste as regards your—well—proportions—" He trailed off uncomfortably, aware that he was blushing. He did not want to think too hard about Enjolras' body, or draw Enjolras' attention to the fact that he thought about it.

Enjolras did not seem particularly comfortable, either, with this evidence that Combeferre paid attention to his proportions. "I thought Courfeyrac was the sartorial expert."

They walked on in silence for a while, as Enjolras led them off the boulevard and plunged into the sleepy Faubourg Saint-Germain. It was the first time a flash of their strange unspoken intimacy had ever made things tense and uncomfortable between them.

Eventually Combeferre tried again. "The other practical things, though. How on earth did you become a student?"

Enjolras shrugged, but seemed more willing to answer this question. "The law school is not like the medical school. They don't ask for a pile of certificates and attestations of good moral character, only a birth certificate and a diploma. I had a twin brother who died in infancy, and so I simply brought them a copy of his birth certificate and enrolled under his name."

"And the diploma?"

"Obviously I took the test without having been to secondary school."

"But how did you get a proper education?" said Combeferre, surprised and rather impressed. They were alone in the street, so he felt safe to continue, "I've seen the excuse for an education my sisters were given. I tried to supplement it when I could, but there's only so much you can do for someone who is being trained to be an ornament and nothing more." He had a sudden, incongruous image of Enjolras at a provincial ball, too tall for the men to want to dance with her, too regal and severe for her ridiculous pastel gown, and yet beautiful in a stern, imposing way that nobody there would ever appreciate. All the beauty in the world would never make Enjolras a suitable ornament.

And yet Enjolras didn't appear interested in the abyss that he had avoided. "I spent a great deal of time in my father's library," he said simply, "and had a number of indulgent tutors."

"But that's amazing," said Combeferre, "it's incredible, that you could educate yourself like that. The education that is given to women has nothing to do with the empty facts, dogmas, and parlor tricks that are drummed into their heads; indeed, they are taught never to look at the amassed knowledge of the world as anything more than a collection of empty facts, dogmas, and parlor tricks, and the education they receive is one in unquestioning obedience. How many little girls have their father's library available to them, and yet remain empty-headed because nobody has ever given them the idea that they should want more? Without encouragement—without guidance—"

"I was not a little girl," said Enjolras, with a severe look that made Combeferre realize he had let his passion carry him away and had raised his voice so far as to intrude upon the silence of the neighborhood. A man was staring at them from the opposite side of the street.

"I was not a little girl," Enjolras repeated quietly. "Even then, I knew I was something else entirely. You find it remarkable that I am not feminine, yet it is no more remarkable than the fact that you did not accept for yourself the maimed education that was given to your sisters. Do not admire me for using what was available to me."

They walked on in silence, Combeferre pondering Enjolras' words: _Even then, I knew I was something else entirely_. Soon he started catching glimpses of the river in the gaps between buildings, and he finally thought to ask:

"Where are we going?"

"The Conciergerie."

"And who is this man we're bailing out?"

"A fanmaker who lives near the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle. Bahorel says his name is Feuilly."


End file.
